🧵 THREAD: Manchester City, the charges, the evidence, & how justice was delayed. Manchester City weren’t charged…

🧵 THREAD: Manchester City, the charges, the evidence, & how justice was delayed. Manchester City weren’t charged because rivals complained or because they 'spent big'. They were charged because evidence shows a decade-long system designed to hide owner funding, inflate revenue & deceive & obstruct investigations. The Premier League’s case didn’t appear overnight. It began in late 2018, triggered by Football Leaks documents - internal emails, invoices, contracts - that contradicted what City had been telling UEFA & the Premier League for years. Those emails are the backbone of everything that followed. At the centre of the case is a simple allegation: Manchester City repeatedly disguised owner funding as commercial revenue. FFP rules require sponsorship income to be real, independent, and market value. What the emails suggest is that City’s biggest 'sponsors' weren’t paying what City claimed - Abu Dhabi was. Take Etihad as an example. Leaked emails show City executives discussing Etihad paying only a fraction of headline sponsorship deals, with the shortfall quietly topped up by Abu Dhabi government-linked entities. One email explicitly references ensuring funds 'come through the correct channels' so they are not detected as separate sources of funding. That is the definition of disguised equity. This wasn’t a one-off. Emails show Etihad deals where shirt sponsorship, stadium, training kit & campus naming rights were all inflated wildly out of line with the market at the time - later confirmed in the actual contracts, not just drafts. The numbers in the leaks weren’t hypothetical. They were real. UEFA auditors suspected this as early as 2013–14. They found £47m of 'intellectual property' sales boosting income, a £5m 'win bonus' paid for an FA Cup final City lost & sponsorships from Aabar and Etisalat above market value. City were fined & restricted - but crucially, UEFA never saw the full records. Why? Because City refused to provide them. This becomes a pattern. When UEFA charged City again in 2020, they imposed a two-year Champions League ban. City appealed to CAS & had it overturned. City fans shout 'INNOCENT', shared out of context screenshots. They're wrong. CAS did not rule that City were innocent. CAS ruled that UEFA could not meet the burden of proof - largely because City did not co-operate. City were fined €10m specifically for obstructing the investigation. Even City's own expert witness was denied access to key information that could have disproved disguised funding. 'No evidence' doesn’t mean nothing happened. It means the evidence was withheld. CAS explicitly stated that disguised equity funding could not be excluded - only that neither side could conclusively prove their case. That vagueness was entirely engineered. After CAS, new emails emerged suggesting Simon Pearce, a senior City executive & Sheikh Mansour adviser, had given misleading testimony under oath. City declined to comment. Again. While all this was happening, the Premier League had already been investigating City for years. City’s response? Delay. Delay. Delay. Obstruct. Litigate. Court filings later revealed City challenged the legality of the investigation itself, filed repeated procedural applications, refused to hand over documents, forced arbitration, then challenged arbitration & tried to keep the entire process secret. A High Court judge called it out in 2021. “It is surprising, and a matter of legitimate public concern, that so little progress has been made.” That’s legal spiel for stonewalling. This obstruction accounts for 35 of the 115 charges alone & that’s before we get to the secret payments. City declared Roberto Mancini's salary as £1.45m per year. On the same day he signed with City, he also signed a “consultancy” deal with Al Jazira - a club owned by the same man who owns City - worth £1.75m per year. That deal was explicitly marked confidential. Emails show City executives arranging the payments. Same signatures. Same people. Same day. The allegation is obvious: City paid Mancini off the books. Leaked documents allege undeclared payments for Yaya Touré, including via third parties. These aren’t rumours. They’re contracts, emails, invoices. This is why there are 14 charges relating to manager and player remuneration. Then there’s image rights. City told UEFA they sold player image rights for a £24.5m lump sum to comply with FFP. Later, they quietly resumed earning millions from image rights again. The buyer? A company whose directors included City’s own senior legal officer. Independent journalists couldn’t even establish its genuine commercial purpose. All of this feeds into the core allegation across 54 charges: City failed to provide accurate financial information in good faith. Not once. Not twice. But repeatedly, over nearly a decade. Now add politics. UK government departments discussed City’s charges with the British embassy in Abu Dhabi. Those communications are sealed - because releasing them could 'damage relations with the UAE'. City insist they are not state-backed. Then why is the state involved? Yet still, the delays continue. A 12-week closed-door hearing. Half a million documents. Years of silence. City remain 'innocent' - not because the evidence disappeared, but because the verdict hasn’t landed. This is why the case matters. If City walk away with a fine, it tells every club to cheat cleverly, obstruct endlessly, spend on lawyers, not compliance.. & the rules collapse. This isn’t about jealousy. It isn’t about success. It’s about whether financial regulation in English football is real - or optional for the richest club in the league. The evidence exists. The emails exist. The delays are documented. Now only one question remains, do the rules apply to City or not?

No Question About That@nqatpod · Dec 30, 2025

We still haven't had a verdict in the 115 charges against City for (alleged) financial malfeasance. City are spending more money this winter, chasing another title. Ed and Adam pick up the story. @AdamJoseph Patreon: buff.ly/hvz9uxW Apple: buff.ly/2pedwZA

This is all publicly available information, by the way. If you enjoyed, please repost it. Tag a City fan in denial. Tag a friend who is sick of arguing with people who don't understand what's happening. Hope people enjoyed it, though City fans won't.

There's plenty of questions to be asked out of this, here's mine: 1. If Etihad, Etisalat, Aabar & other Abu Dhabi-linked sponsors paid the full value of their deals themselves, why have City never allowed regulators to see the sponsors' incoming funds for the relevant periods? 2. Why do leaked internal emails explicitly refer to sponsors paying only part of agreed sums, with "Abu Dhabi partners" making up the balance - & why has City never produced evidence disproving this? 3. Why were sponsorship values at City multiples higher than market comparables at the time - & who independently verified those valuations? 4. Why did City’s own executives discuss ensuring money came through "correct channels" so it wouldn’t appear as separate funding? 5. Why did Roberto Mancini sign two contracts on the same day - one with Manchester City and one with Al Jazira - both signed by City-linked executives? 6. What actual work did Mancini perform for Al Jazira that justified £1.75m per year - & where is the evidence of that work? 7. Why were those Al Jazira payments contractually required to be kept secret? 8. If payments to Mancini & Yaya Touré were legitimate, why were they not disclosed to UEFA & the Premier League at the time? 9. If City "did nothing wrong" in 2014, why did they accept a €60m fine, squad restrictions, wage caps, & transfer limits rather than fully contest the case? 10. Why did UEFA auditors say City's income had been artificially inflated via intellectual property sales & related-party transactions? 11. Why did City agree never to repeat those accounting practices if they were legitimate? 12. Why have City been repeatedly fined & criticised for non-cooperation - by UEFA, CAS, the Premier League & a High Court judge? 13. Why did City refuse to provide documents that even their own expert witness said would have been necessary to disprove disguised funding? 14. Why did a UK High Court judge state it was "surprising & of legitimate public concern" that so little progress had been made after years of investigation? 15. Why do City fans and representatives claim CAS "cleared" City when the panel explicitly said neither side’s hypothesis could be proven due to lack of evidence? 16. Why did CAS fine City €10m for non-cooperation if City had fully complied? 17. Why was key evidence (including later Football Leaks documents) not available to CAS at the time? 18. Why is City leading the charge to weaken APT rules if their sponsorships are genuinely at fair market value? 19. Why would stricter scrutiny of related-party sponsorships be a threat unless those deals rely on ownership links? 20. Why did the UK government discuss City’s charges with its embassy in Abu Dhabi - & why would disclosure "risk UK–UAE relations"? 21. If City are not state-backed in any meaningful way, why would diplomatic sensitivity exist at all? 22. One that City NEVER answers - if they have a “comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence,” why has none of it been made public, why has every investigation been marked by delay, obstruction & partial disclosure? These are not accusations. They are unanswered questions. And in regulated sport - especially one built on competitive integrity - silence, obstruction & delay are not neutral acts. They are signals. If City truly have nothing to hide, the solution has always been simple - open the books. Fully. Everywhere. Shouldn't be hard if they're innocent, right?